"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."~~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

No, it's not the "I Have A Dream" speech most people associate with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and ceremoniously trot out every year as we commemorate his birthday. These words are from a King speech largely ignored by mainstream commentators who are content to pigeonhole him as a "slain civil rights leader," as though his Nobel Prize was awarded solely for his civil rights efforts.

It's a speech known very well to advocates of peace and social justice. It's an audacious, even dangerous speech which turned many former supporters against him after he gave it, and may even have accelerated the efforts of those who felt so threatened by this audacity that they murdered him a year after he delivered it. And it's a speech that has even more resonance for us today than it did more than 40 years ago, and not merely because we will see our first African-American President inaugurated five days after what would have been Dr. King's 80th birthday.